Quotes from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true,
only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.' ”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you've gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I'd come to see that it was usually your best course of action.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“You know how everything seems so normal when you’re growing up,” she asked plaintively, “and then comes this moment when you realize your whole family is nuts?”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“No Utopia is Utopia for everyone”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I still haven't found the place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The sunset you see is always better than the one you don’t. More stars are always better than less.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability. I believe the same can be said of many families.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The secret to a good life,” he told me once, “is to bring your A game to everything you do. Even if all you’re doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Language is such an imprecise vehicle I sometimes wonder why we bother with it.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Airports and train stations are where you get to cry”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“If stupid were fuel, we would never run out.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique--our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language--some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we'd have learned to be more cautious over the years.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Over the years I’ve come to feel that the way people respond to us has less to do with what we’ve done and more to do with who they are.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

About the author

Popular quotes

“Oh, the future. I see.” A shadow fell over the doctor’s face. “You’re wondering if your son will get cancer? Or be hit by a car? Or be bipolar? Or have autism? Or drug problems? I don’t know, I’m not a psychic. Welcome to parenthood.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man

“Beyond the marketplace, nearly all human relationships involve give-and-take, and all such relationships break down when one or both parties do too much taking and not enough giving. In fact, the tension between individual and collective interest arises not only between us but within us. As noted above, complex cells have been cooperating for about a billion years. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for some of the cells in an animal’s body to start pulling for themselves instead of for the team, a phenomenon known as cancer.”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Ask your brain to do math every day, and it gets better at math. Ask your brain to worry, and it gets better at worrying. Ask your brain to concentrate, and it gets better at concentrating. Not”
― Kelly McGonigal, quote from The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It

“The odd sensation I had while cooking would often last through the meal, then dissolve as I climbed the stairs. I would enter my room and discover the homework books I had left on the bed had disappeared into my backpack. I’d look inside my books and be shocked to find that the homework had been done. Sometimes it had been done well, at others it was slapdash, the writing careless, my own handwriting but scrawled across the page.
As I read the work through, I would get the creepy feeling that someone was watching me. I would turn quickly, trying to catch them out, but the door would be closed. There was never anyone there. Just me. My throat would turn dry. My shoulders would feel numb. The tic in my neck would start dancing as if an insect was burrowing beneath the surface of the skin. The symptoms would intensify into migraines that lasted for days and did not respond to treatment or drugs. The attack would come like a sudden storm, blow itself out of its own accord or unexpectedly vanish.
Objects repeatedly went missing: a favourite pen, a cassette, money. They usually turned up, although once the money had gone it had gone for ever and I would find in the chest of drawers a T-shirt I didn’t remember buying, a Depeche Mode cassette I didn’t like, a box of sketching pencils, some Lego.”
― quote from Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

“One evening he was in his room, his brow pressing hard against the pane, looking, without seeing them, at the chestnut trees in the park, which had lost much of their russet-coloured foliage. A heavy mist obscured the distance, and the night was falling grey rather than black, stepping cautiously with its velvet feet upon the tops of the trees. A great swan plunged and replunged amorously its neck and shoulders into the smoking water of the river, and its whiteness made it show in the darkness like a great star of snow. It was the single living being that somewhat enlivened the lonely landscape.”
― Théophile Gautier, quote from Mademoiselle de Maupin

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.